Thursday's Child Read Online Free

two of them ate rare roast beef and oven-browned potatoes. The food, as usual, was very good. Also, as usual, there was very little conversation. At least, there wasn’t once Saul got past the point of why the hell Beau couldn’t put on a damned tie for dinner. Or, at any rate, some goddamned shoes.
    It was all just so much noise by now. Beau liked it a lot better on those nights when Saul was out and he could eat in the kitchen with Harold and his wife Ruth. Nobody bitched about what he was wearing then.
    Although Beau was not really aware of it, there were very few people in the city of Los Angeles who would dare to defy Saul Epstein over even something as insignificant as proper dinner attire. Saul was about the last of the old-style movie moguls, but he was one who still had power. The studio he had formed decades ago and continued to run with undiluted authority made a profit most years. Not that it mattered much to him. He had enough money already.
    Beau poured more gravy over his food. He had never met his grandfather before that day about four months earlier, had only been vaguely aware that he even existed. Jonathan never liked to talk much about his past. The estrangement between Saul and his only child—caused by politics, a son’s rejection of the career his father had chosen for him, and a marriage that was, in the old man’s eyes, unsuitable—that estrangement ran deep and never ended.
    â€œSome more beef?” Harold offered.
    Beau shook his head. “Thanks anyway.” He liked Harold, who had picked him up at the airport and who, with Ruth, tried to make him feel welcome.
    What Beau had still not been able to figure out was why his grandfather had sent for him in the first place. Had even, in fact, pulled strings and enlisted the aid of the American Embassy to demand that Beau be immediately dispatched to California. Given the choice, Beau would not have left. He would have done what his friends were doing and joined the rebels. To hell with stupid pacifism. Look where that kind of thinking had got Jonathan and Rachel. But the choice was never offered to him.
    After a couple more minutes, Harold cleared away the plates and disappeared into the kitchen to get dessert. Beau tapped the edge of the table and whistled softly.
    Saul glared at him and then seemed to struggle for a mild tone when he spoke. “School will be out next week,” he said, lifting his wine goblet. He took a tidy sip. “Have you given any thought to what it is you might like to do over the summer?”
    Beau frowned, pretending to think about it. He picked up his own goblet and took a swallow. Saul was of the traditional school that believed a young man should learn to drink at home. Therefore, Beau was allowed one glass of wine each night with dinner. He didn’t like it as much as the homebrewed beer he and his friends used to sneak back in Santa María. He swallowed more wine and then brightened. “I could travel,” he said.
    Saul might have been old, but he was no dummy. “No,” he said sharply. “You may not go back to that place.”
    Beau was having a hard time adjusting to life within a dictatorship. Rachel and Jonathan had always run things as a democracy, in which everybody got a vote, even Beau. He drank some more wine. “So why even bother to ask me what I want?” he said. “What I say doesn’t seem to matter a damned bit anyway.”
    Saul sighed. “You’re very much like your father, aren’t you?” he said. It was practically the first time in all the weeks Beau had been there that Saul had mentioned Jonathan.
    Beau toyed with the dessert spoon, sliding it up and down on the white linen tablecloth. “I’m not so much like him,” he said softly. “Jonathan was pretty naive. Right up until he died.”
    Saul’s lips thinned.
    Harold returned and served them chocolate mousse. Nobody spoke until he was gone